15 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Church (1989)

Did anyone make films quite as weird as the Italians did in the 80s?  Who would think to match science fiction with demonic possession (The Visitor) or zombie demons inhabitting human souls through a movie screen (Demons) or crazy witches being buried alive under a church like in Michele Soavi's The Church.

A bunch of Tutonic Knights massacre of village of people believing them to be witches and harbingers of the plague.  They bury them in a mass grave and bless the cite, erecting a gargantuan Gothic Cathedral of it.  Cut to the present day:  Evan (Thomas Arana) is the new librarian of said Cathedral.  He immediately starts a romance with Lisa (Barbara Cupisti) an artist who is restoring a rather gruesome looking fresco and with her help discovers an ancient piece of parchment that promises power underneath the church.  Driven by ambition he goes to the church catacombs where he discovers the grave cite and removes a creepy looking head stone, suffers a bizarre vision quest, and unleashes an evil and ancient vengeance upon the Church.

I'm a little bit of a fan of Soavi, particularly his first film Stage Fright and more so Cemetery Man, but it took me a while to finally get to The Church.  First off, this film is a little bit of a mess, but ultimately still strangely fulfilling and satisfying.  The dialogue is horribly dubbed (in English that is) as many Italian productions usually are which can be distracting at times, but overall the ultra stylish look of the film makes up for it.  When I found myself rolling my eyes I was luckily treated with dialogue-less scene relying and heavy mood lighting and incredible music (Keith Emerson, Goblin, Philip Glass, Fabio Pignatelli) to convey the story (the real success of this film) and bring my attention back to it.  Like Stage Fright the majority of the film takes a bit of time to get to the meaty bits, but that was something that always separated Soavi from his contemporaries.  He was more interested in mood than shoot it cheap and get to the gore.  Luckily, when he does do gore and FX (especially creature FX) he delivers as good, if not better than most.

Produced by Dario Argento, the story goes that Argento had intended the film to be Demons 3 but Soavi insisted on it being a stand alone.  Still there are obvious nods to the Demons films, likely from Argento's active producer and co-screen writer role, which is probably why at times the plot-line feels disjointed.  Soavi would only make one more collaborative effort with Argento in his 1990 film The Sect after which he chose to pursue other avenues of film making rather than being trapped as a purely horror director.  Also, worth mentioning, Soavi served as an assistant director to Terry Gilliam on The Adventures of the Baron Munchausen and the impression that experience must have made is quite evident in the fantastic elements of his style.  Truth be told, as often as the film annoyed me, I kept marveling at the sheer scope of it.  It was clearly a very ambitious film for Soavi and likely served as a learning experience that he would take to his later films.  I'm eager to re-watch it now in the original Italian language, but for that I'll have to find a physical copy somewhere.  If you're an Amazon Prime member you can stream it for no extra cost on through amazon.